Media coding and delivery has seen substantial advances in recent years. With the amalgamation of compression and transport tools that define media standards, today one can transport media through a variety of networks using a vast range of tools that correspond to a vast range of efficiencies in the end-to-end delivery. If one is concerned with the highest efficiency media delivery, one is often confined to more recent, state-of-the-art tools that typically have high royalty/licensing costs. If, on the other hand, one allows some inefficiency, it may be possible to accomplish delivery with reduced royalty costs or even free of any royalty costs.
Media standards only allow for very limited exploitation of such trade-offs through profiles defined within a standard. One can also choose among different standards in order to realize such trade-offs. However, the available alternatives via profiles and different standards are few and often times not very meaningful for every application. As general purpose computing devices become ever more prevalent, it is clear that there are many scenarios that can benefit from a continuum of choices that allow for the optimal realization of such trade-offs.
Prior solutions define a very limited and coarse set of options an encoder can use in delivering media. If the encoder uses a given profile of a given standard the media delivery can be accomplished at a fixed license cost that covers the use of all tools in that profile. The encoder cannot optimize licensing costs for example based on the content of the media to be delivered, the desired media quality at the decoder, and the effective bandwidth of the transport medium. The situation is similar if the encoder can only choose among different media coding standards.
Tools included in media standards are selected and declared normative during the standardization process. This process happens in a way that can only coarsely accommodate all desired uses of media coding. Many good tools are not included in the final selection because they are not applicable to all envisioned scenarios, they are not amenable for efficient implementation on all envisioned hardware platforms, have reduced coding efficiency, etc.
Currently, some of the tools selected as normative within a media coding standard are utilized much more often than other normative tools. Yet their share from the pool of revenue obtained from standard licensing can be the same or even less than the other tools.
Media encoding using current techniques often require one to license a standard and pay royalties to the organization governing the standard's patent pool and/or individual IP holders. Once this is done, media is encoded by obtaining a license from content owners.